farblog

If you’ve added developers to your App Engine project and can’t work out why they don’t seem to be recognised as administrators — login:admin paths return a 403, users.is_current_user_admin() returns false, etc — you need to check two things:

1. (the easy bit) The developers need to accept your invitation to join the project. The Developers page on the administration console should show a status of “Active”, not “Pending”.
2. (the just-plain-weird bit) Someone — you, or one of the new developers — needs to redeploy your application.

If you skip step 2, you’ll find that the new developers can access the administration console fine, but aren’t considered to be administrators by your application. This is totally weird, and totally undocumented. Hopefully it’ll be fixed soon, but until then, maybe this note will save someone else some confusion.